OPERA: 'FEUERSNOT,' STRAUSS ONE-ACT

By DONAL HENAHAN

Published: December 13, 1985

''FEUERSNOT,'' Richard Strauss's second opera, is a surprisingly patchy effort by a man who would go on to compose 13 more operas, including half a dozen of the most popular in the repertory. Although he wrote this one-act piece at age 36 when he was already a mature artist renowned for his tone poems, it sounds like a young composer still thrashing about, trying to settle on his own style and purpose. ''Feuersnot,'' whose performance on Wednesday evening at the Manhattan School of Music was believed to be its New York City premiere, is nonetheless fascinating as a case study in artistic bravado and career-building.

Composed in 1900, ''Feuersnot'' was nothing less than his attempt to certify himself with the Munich public as Wagner's heir: as Richard the Third, a title he awarded himself while modestly conceding that there could be no Richard the Second. The opera's name is not easily translated, but ''Need-Fires,'' ''Fire-Famine'' and ''Fire-Dearth'' are standard efforts. The reference is to a superstitious practice in the Middle Ages when all fires in a town would be doused and a communal bonfire built as a defense against cattle plague. In this version of a Flemish legend the alchemist Kunrad, who is Richard Strauss thinly disguised, falls in love with Diemut, a soprano who symbolizes the Munich public. He humiliates the lady by kissing her in public. In revenge, Diemut contrives to trap her suitor in a basket suspended beneath her window while the whole town gathers to enjoy his humiliation. In a rage, Kunrad uses magical powers granted to him by his teacher, Meister Reichert (Wagner), to extinguish all the flames in Munich. Fortunately, Diemut relents and avows her love for the alchemist, who restores the town's fire.

Like even the most minor score by Strauss, this one is full of orchestral pleasures. Reminders of the tone poems are everywhere and premonitions of ''Rosenkavalier'' waltz by. Allusions to Wagner operas abound. The student orchestra under John Crosby's direction, though necessarily reduced to fit the theater, played the score excitingly at times and always well enough to let the listener measure the work's quality. Lauren Wagner and Cheyne Davidson, as Diemut and Kunrad, caught the music's glitter and purple-patch sensuality at key moments, though he was bland dramatically and she alternately stiff and gauche. Miss Wagner's healthy soprano, capable of idiomatically bright and glittering Straussian tones, coped reasonably well with her wide-ranging part. Mr. Davidson, also robust of voice, often forgot to sing expressively while delivering notes, but he made a handsomely blond Kunrad. Lesser roles were sung competently.

The libretto, softly pornographic in the German original, is wordily antidramatic. Strauss apparently did not feel confident enough to argue with his collaborator, Ernst von Wolzogen, as he did so creatively in later and greater operas with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Not much of the text, in any event, could be made out in this performance, given in an English version by William Wallace. Lou Galterio's production, which had to cramp large choruses of cavorting adults and squalling children onto the school's modest stage, could not plead gracefully for the opera's cause. Rickety pseudo-Brechtian scenery, built largely of iron-pipe scaffolding, skated about on rollers. The basket in which Kunrad was suspended looked remarkably like a dumpster. Costumes, meant to suggest midsummer-night carnival time in medieval Munich, were distractingly ugly.

Still, if the limitations imposed by a school production sometimes proved too stringent for such a problematical opera, one could nevertheless thank Mr. Crosby and his troupe for letting New York assess the work that led directly into ''Salome'' and the rest of the Strauss canon. This country has been witnessing a revival of interest in the less-familiar Strauss operas and for that Mr. Crosby can take much credit.

''Feuersnot'' will be repeated tonight at 8 and on Sunday afternoon at 2:30.